From US to Estonian newspapers within minutes. How Scanpix allows journalists to get hold of world class photos fast.

When opening a newspaper, whether it’s on paper or a digital one, most people have little idea what goes on behind the scenes and how a news event becomes a news story.

As most of the stories that get covered happen thousands of kilometers away from us, it’s not rational to keep teams scattered around the globe in an attempt to cover everything. Instead of this news companies take part of data arbitration with each other, sharing news stories with other agencies all over the world. It’s a win-win situation. And it doesn’t only apply for written word, but photography and videos as well.

This is exactly where Scanpix comes into play. With roots of supplying digital images to news outlets in Estonia and Baltics already in the late 90’s, Scanpix is the biggest player in providing journalists with photo and video material in the Baltic and Nordic countries.

The concept is similar to stock photo websites, but in the case of Scanpix, the images being added daily are more about current events (so called “editorial photos”) from different vendors all over the world like Reuters, New York Times or Associated Press — each of them sending potentially hundreds of new images to Scanpix every single day.

The most common use case of Scanpix portal would be for a journalist who is working on an article to go to Scanpix for searching corresponding pictures. They have the option to filter by Agency (i.e. the company who owns the pictures, like Reuters), dates, people on the photos, titles and even create saved searches that you might use often.

And then there’s the business side of things — Scanpix bills the companies monthly, based on how many pictures and by which vendors their employees have downloaded. To achieve this, there’s an elaborate statistics module built in to the administration panel, alongside the option to manage users, companies, packages, permissions etc.

The Problem

As the Scanpix platform had been evolving from already the late 1990s — so close to quarter of a century by now — there had been a lot of iterative development gone into it and functionalities added to the platform over the years which were never thought about when the previous version of Scanpix was released.

Over this period the same thing happened, which happens often to software that has been in use for a long time without a clean rewrite — piling on new features to the old platform made it sluggish to use, the design of the platform was also becoming dated and the usability got worse with more new features being added.

There were also issues with the logic of how users and companies were stored and how connections between them were formed. This caused potential issues with the statistics, which in turn was a major potential problem, as each month the outgoing billing was strictly based on statistics shown by the portal.

Given these issues, Scanpix realised that at this point incremental changes and improvements are probably not enough and sooner or later a larger rewrite of the whole portal for all 3 countries was in order.

The Solution

At this point Scanpix turned to us for a fresh start from a clean slate. This would offer an opportunity not only to switch to a modern tech stack, but also to update the design and UX and revisit the functionalities.

We were also able to map out functionalities that weren’t required anymore and simplify the architecture, making everything simpler and more lightweight, coming up with a platform that should be able to sustain the next 10 years of future developments for Scanpix.

For end users the main objective was to offer a familiar and functional platform — but better.

Something they could continue using without missing a beat, but also would be an obvious upgrade.

At the same time we could add some long-awaited features.
One of these was the concept of collections. Often when a journalist is working on a story, they don’t want to just add a single image, but rather a gallery. For this we implemented a “collections” feature, where users can quickly add a shortlist of pictures, then adjust this shortlist as needed and then download everything with a single click.

The aim for Scanpix employees was similar — to offer a simpler and more robust way to manage users, companies and packages that the companies use, while also providing a more modern and user-friendly clean look.

Similarly to end users, the administrators had also been looking forward to some features which would make billing easier, like grouping downloads per user or providing a downloads gallery view, just to name a few.

Because we were already building a completely new solution, both front- and backend, then we also took time to overhaul the API that several vendors were using to interface with Scanpix data.

Next steps

While all new Scanpix sites for Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania are live now, this isn’t the end of the project. We will keep working with Scanpix to keep improving the platform and adding new features. Currently one of the noteworthy features in progress is the ability for regular newspaper readers to purchase high quality images that they see in the news. Probably not a lot of people are interested in downloading a picture of a politician, but there’s often photo coverage of larger sporting events or festivals. In these cases users would be able to not only get a professional high resolution of the photo, but would also own a license to have a legal permission to use it.

When all was said and done our main question was — how to know if we can call the project a success. For Scanpix employees we had already been working side-by-side for a few months as the portal was in beta. This gave us time to resolve any issues and also work to add additional convenience features that the old portal didn’t have.

For end users we believed that the easiest way to get feedback was just to ask — we added Hotjar integration that allowed every new user to give feedback on the new portal. After a month of being live we were happy to conclude that the feedback that we received had been overwhelmingly positive.

Building a digital service or product yourself?

We can help you to expand your market and increase your user satisfaction by designing and developing digital solutions that bring real value to your users. Let’s have a call and see what we can do for you.